The darkness surrounding tonight's stars holds a deep blue tint. Looking across the Bay I detect a faint glow rolling the world's ragged curve, amber flashes breaking in the soft luminance. These are the lights of guidance towers far in the distance. They're beautiful.

Tonight is the flash-point of a brave new year, a personal mark on the track... an old finishing, a new starting, a now holding everything between this and the next February end. I've said it many ways since 02008 01 01... but tonight, for me, the work does truly commence. It's going to be a hell of year. I know this because I won't rest until it is.

Over the last few twelvemonths, I've mapped deep structural elements within, examined tightly wound zones I knew only by the barbed wire and lightning launchers ringing their barriers. I knew them, circled their cloaked existence, but didn't understand enough of what they contained to name them. If you can name, you can own... and re-make.

I cannot take all credit for my transfiguration. Often I was simply in the right frame of mind at the right time, aware enough to notice a silver key or magickal wrecking ball dangled in front of me by a friendly universe. One by one I have turned the rusted tumblers of entrances to long-sealed emotional crypts, felled the bulwarks of boneyard fortresses, opened trapped realms in my heart to exploration and merciful release. It hasn't always been pretty.

This image is of NASA's Skylab circling our home planet, 01974 02 08. It's a vision I hold in my mind. I use it to remind myself of this world's true nature when I need perspective, of the true nature of humanity and its relation to the spinning blue, of my true nature as an avatar of our shared existence.

By default, I've travelled the underworld all the short years of my life. I was born there, but it's no longer my most useful metaphor for psychological motivation. Like Buckminster Fuller's dismissal of the classic nomenclature up and down, I'm now leaving under and above to dust-laden superstition. They're useful for fairy tales, but I need an accurate descriptor: a name to own and re-make.

As with the sky, I've become aware the true directions of self are in and out.

Out is where I'm headed.